Rousseau, Lyon’s super-footballer, has scored four goals in the European Women’s Championship to date. This was of a different order, a fierce shot saved by Sweden goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl had seen the ball squarely squared by two defenders only for the 23-year-old to tap her heel through it, sending it through two sets of legs and into the net . Edited with added hip-hop commentary – “I get the ball, I shoot, I miss … like, I got it!” – Russo’s cheeky strike has been viewed 900,000 times on BBC Sport’s TikTok account. On Twitter, the number is over 2 million. Meanwhile, in more traditional media settings, the BBC reports a figure of 9.3 million viewers watching the match on BBC One (which rises by another 2m when you add online streams). This contrasts with a peak audience of 980,000 watching England play India in Twenty20 cricket on BBC Two last weekend. Russo herself described the goal as the result of a decision to find “the quickest route to get that ball in the back of the net”. The Manchester United player, who now has 172,000 followers on Instagram, confirmed that she doesn’t often score goals in such an unorthodox way and that “I don’t think you’ll see that again”. It was definitely important, though. “To score in a semi-final and make the final is a huge highlight of my career,” he said. The England team returned from Sheffield to their south-west London base on Wednesday with news helicopters following their manager. The players are now resting before preparing for the final at Wembley at 5pm on Sunday. England manager Sarina Wiegman, who has shown herself to be as decisive a performer as any of the players on the pitch in recent weeks, said her side were “ready to make history” by becoming the first team women of England. and the second national team, to win a major competition. But with “football coming home” echoing across the country once again, he noted the wider significance the victory could have. “We said before the tournament and throughout the tournament that we want to inspire the nation, I think that’s what we’re doing and making a difference. The whole country is proud of us and even more girls and boys will want to play football.” The video of eight-year-old Tess Dolan dancing in the Bramall Lane stands after the Sweden game, another viral cut-through, seemed to symbolize the moment when a lifelong involvement in sport and an active life could begin. “It crosses my mind, when I grow up I want to be a footballer,” he told BBC Breakfast. “I was looking at how they celebrated and thinking about how I would celebrate.” But 10 years after the Olympic Games arrived in London, a question of legacy now arises again. Can this public commitment, affection in fact, lead to more people in general and more girls in particular taking up the national game? BBC pundit Ian Wright said after the semi-final that “if girls are now not allowed to play football in PE classes like boys, then what are we doing?” The former England men’s international’s words speak to the fact that less than half of the country’s secondary schools currently offer girls the opportunity to play football as part of the curriculum. Research commissioned by the FA showed that while only a third of girls aged 5-18 took part in football every week, 91% of those without access to PE wanted to play. “What we’re trying to break here is years of tradition, decades of tradition where football is catered to boys and therefore taught by male PE specialists,” says Louise Gear, the FA’s head of development. “There are fewer female PE specialists who are actually trained and able to teach football. So there is a challenge of confidence and capacity that schools face. That’s the biggest hurdle right now.” The lack of instruction has implications for women’s participation in soccer more broadly, Gear says. “It’s not about competing with other sports, it’s about equality and girls having access to football like boys,” she says. “What we find most often in secondary schools is that the sports that are taught in PE lessons and games are the sports that appear in after school clubs and games. The school then creates representative sides. Then they start competing with other schools in the area. It’s a domino effect.” The FA currently runs an in-school training program for teachers, supported by Barclays, but also has another program that starts at a younger age. Shooting Stars, which works in partnership with Disney, looks to make elementary school girls confident enough to take up the sport on the playground, a place dominated by boys. These changes are systemic and require resources and determination. But the impact of having role models recognizable across the country cannot be understated, according to Gear. “It’s absolutely huge,” he says. “Yes, they inspire the whole nation – you feel it, don’t you? – but girls have to see it to believe it. They need to see those standards on the football field, playing at a top level, to believe that this is a sport for women and girls, not just boys and men.”
